


i keep on moving in the spaces where you used to be

by judypoovey



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bi Male Characters, Jewish Joyce Byers, a weird fic that jumps around in time and will go off the rails entirely, cop's rights to shut the fuck up, hella bi, murray bauman supports cop's rights, yeah i went there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-06-29 06:50:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19824772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: “I’m not an idiot. We didn’t go into this whole…thing…with a plan. We accidentally abducted Alexei — And he just knew to find you. He didn’t have time to call anyone, he didn’t have time to plan anything. He just knew you’d help him. You can’t tell me that came from you poking around asking about Barb for a couple of months last year. You two knew each other. Trusted each other, in your own fucking crazy way.”“It’s kind of a long story.”





	1. 1985/1964

**Author's Note:**

> i love three damaged disaster adults who love and trust and rely on each other. if anyone wants to give me a belated birthday present, fanart of young hopper and murray is top of my list.

He’d never been to a funeral attended by an entire town before. He was glad to be able to fade into the background, only acknowledged by the Byers clan and Nancy’s concerned glance over her bored-looking father’s shoulder.

Joyce waved him over to stand with her, but he chose the shade of a tree, just out of the way. At the corner of his vision, he saw Dr. Owens, similarly distant from the proceedings.

Murray Bauman had been to his fair share of funerals, of course. Who hadn’t?

This felt different.

As the citizens of Hawkins began to disperse, Joyce found him, sliding her arm through his and leaning against him in a warmly familiar way. It was curious to think that they’d only known each other a week, because it seemed like it had been a lifetime.

“Come back to the house for a drink,” she said.

He nodded.

\--

It took another hour to get away from the funeral properly and back to Joyce’s house. He’d been flagged down by Nancy and Owens in two separate conversations – one infinitely more tolerable than the other – and waited for Joyce to drop Will and El off at the Hendersons for the afternoon.

Her house was empty. Modest, well-loved, and a little disastrous, but it felt homey.

She poured two glasses of rum, splashed some Coke in them, and sat down on the couch, leaning up against him. It had taken some convincing of the government officials that he should be allowed to go home after the disaster of the fourth, and he’d spent a couple of nights on Joyce’s couch as a result. He’d finally been allowed to leave, only to turn around and come right back for the funeral.

“Can I ask you something?” she said, letting a little bit of sadness slip through.

It was remarkable how quickly Joyce Byers recovered from tragedy. She’d lived through her fair share of it, he supposed. Even disregarding their obvious romantic affections, Hopper had been her closest friend for nearly thirty years and she was sitting there, looking whole and unbroken. She had taken a day or two to break down, and it had been devastating to witness, but then she had just…switched her grief off. He knew it was for El’s sake, and Will and Jonathan too, but he wondered if it was healthy.

For his part, he couldn’t truly place his own sadness. It felt unearned.

“Ask me whatever you’d like,” he said.

“How did you know Hop?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, 20 years of well-practiced denial coming back to him quite easily.

“I’m not an idiot. We didn’t go into this whole…thing…with a plan. We accidentally abducted Alexei –” Another pang of sadness passed between them. They really had fucked the whole thing up, hadn’t they? “—And he just knew to find you. He didn’t have time to call anyone, he didn’t have time to plan _anything_. He just _knew_ you’d help him. You can’t tell me that came from you poking around asking about Barb for a couple of months last year. You two _knew_ each other. Trusted each other, in your own fucking crazy way.” 

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“I think we have time.” She paused. “But you don’t have to tell it if you don’t want to.” Grief was an odd thing – she was slightly bleary eyed but regarding him with an honest interest. Hearing stories of a time where he knew Jim and she hadn’t would be something of a comfort to her. Reliving it, for him, felt like a nightmare.

But he would have to, for her.

“It was probably around 1964. Honestly, my memory of that time is slightly hazy.”

\--

**_1964, Chicago, IL._ **

“Why am I here?” Murray Bauman, presently 21 years old and handcuffed to a table, asked, his glasses sliding down his nose as he looked at the cop in front of him, and a rookie standing a few feet behind him looking stoic and intimidating, in spite of barely being any older than Murray himself.

“You know damn well why you’re here, you beatnik shit,” the older cop said.

“You threw a beer bottle into a police car,” the young one supplied, as if Murray might have forgotten.

“Did I?” He did. “Did you see me do that?” he asked the young one.

“No…”

“Did you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I saw,” the cop said.

“Are you implying that you’re not accountable for actually witnessing the lawbreaking you’re enforcing? You can just arrest people at random for petty crimes that no one saw them commit?” he asked. “The Times will be so interested in that,” he continued, leaning forward.

“The Times will also be interested in why one of their reporters in in jail for destruction of property,” he said.

Murray wasn’t going to correct them that he wasn’t yet a full-time reporter, he was just a fact checker. It didn’t matter. Whatever they needed to believe to let him out.

The superior officer left him in there, alone with the quiet rookie.

“You know where to get a drink in this fucking town?” the rookie asked.

“I could show you a place, but I’m presently indisposed.”

“My shift will be over by the time they let you go.”

“All right then.”

True to his word, the rookie was waiting across the street from the station in a beat-up pickup truck when Murray got let go an hour and a half later, no one in the station being able to really pin him for his alleged crime.

He got in the truck, reflecting on how his mother had once told him not to get into cars with strangers, but shook the thought off and directed the rookie to a jazz club that he liked to frequent. “You’re going to ruin my reputation going in there like that,” he said, gesturing to the rookie’s outfit. He’d abandoned the uniform coat but still he just…looked like a cop. “Lose the shirt.”

“What?” He balked a little, and it made it obvious that he was still a little bit of a kid underneath a thick beard and lantern jaw.

“You’ve got one on under it, don’t you?” he said, gesturing to the buttoned-up plaid shirt.

“Fine.” Down to a white t-shirt and dark uniform pants, he still looked like a cop, but maybe not as much of one.

The doorman recognized him, waving them in through the crowd of people, and they found a seat that was close enough to hear the woman singing and far enough to hear each other talking. She was good, with a deep, calm voice that cut through the murmur of the club with ease.

“I’m Jim, by the way,” rookie said. “Jim Hopper.”

“Murray Bauman.”

\--

**_1985, Hawkins, IN._ **

“So Hopper arrested you and you became friends?” she asked, refilling their drinks.

“Uh, well. I mean. Kinda.”

“There’s more to the story?”

“It skips around a lot,” he confessed.


	2. 1964-65/1985

**_1985, Hawkins, IN._ **

Joyce was sprawled on the couch now, her feet in Murray’s lap, her drink slightly sloshing as she struggled to drink it. “So you were a cop-hating miscreant.”

“Still am.”

“Gimme a refill before you keep going.”

“You got it.”

Drinking was a good way to smash down all the deep dark emotions that had been pushing and pulling at him all week. Ugh, he hated feeling things.

\--

**_1964, Chicago, IL._ **

They spent a lot of that summer together. Murray’s studio apartment, only shared with some incredibly unpleasant rats, was better than the shared two-bedroom Jim had with a couple more idiots from the academy. There was only so much cop Murray could stomach.

Jim had fled his ridiculously tiny town as soon as he reasonably could after high school, landing as a rookie cop in the big city. They compared Hawkins to Murray’s slightly more metropolitan upbringing in Highland Park and his time in college in Chicago. Jim wanted to work in New York, but Chicago was all right. Murray wanted to be a journalist.

They were exact opposites in demeanor and values, so their time spent together couldn’t really be called friendship. Or at least, their egos never really allowed it to be.

“What’s up with this book?” Jim asked, picking up a tattered copy of War and Peace.

“It’s in Russian.”

“You know Russian?”

“I studied it in college.”

“Oh. Doesn’t that get you put on a watchlist or something?” he joked, though neither of them thought it was really a joke at all. It probably did. Not that he wasn’t already on a couple.

“Too late,” he said, snorting.

“Wanna go to the bar?”

The misfortune of Murray’s apartment was that it was above a particularly divey bar that they had begun to frequent. It probably wasn’t the best use of their limited free time, but it was what they had in common. “Sure,” he said, pulling his hair back and slipping on his shoes.

_(“You had long hair?” Joyce giggled._

_“It was the 60s!”)_

By the time they got back upstairs, they were too drunk and tired to do anything other than collapse, and Murray didn’t own a couch, so they both wound up half on the mattress and half on the floor.

\--

**_1985, Hawkins._ **

At some point during the telling, Murray had fallen asleep. He woke up from the sensation of being watched, blinking up at Jonathan Byers, who was watching him with profound mistrust. “What the hell, Jonathan?”

“I could say the same thing,” he deadpanned.

Joyce was drooling on Murray’s shoulder, glass of rum precariously teetering in her hand. He grabbed it and set it on the table.

“Ah, shit, Joyce, time to go to bed.” Elbowing her gently, she didn’t wake, so he wrapped an arm around her middle and stood up, dragging her with him. He stumbled a little, but Joyce didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. “I got this,” he said with an undue confidence.

Jonathan still grabbed Joyce’s other arm, slinging it over his shoulder and they half-carried her back to her bedroom, setting her on the bed and leaving her there to sleep it off.

\--

“You gonna finish the story?” she asked, when the kids had scattered to the wind for the evening and they were once again left alone. “You went from being kinda friends to acquaintances who barely liked each other. Something must’ve happened. Unless I missed it while I was asleep?”

“I think I fell asleep before you,” he said, clearing the dinner table while Joyce started on the dishes. “I don’t know.” He sighed.

There were parts of the story he worried about sharing with Joyce, like maybe she’d be offended or mad at him. He’d been an asshole in those days. Well, Jim had been an asshole too, but she knew that. She didn’t know him well enough to forgive his shittiness quite yet. And he found himself inexplicably caring so much what Joyce thought of him.

But two Vodka Tonics into the night, he found himself way less apprehensive than he had been an hour before.

“We gotta skip ahead a little.”

\--

**_1965, Chicago IL._ **

Vietnam had started. Tensions had been rising all over the country. For his part, Murray had been in at least two full on riots. He’d not quite gotten the promotion he’d been angling for, but he was close. He had been currying favor with his boss by having a secret inside track within the police department. Of course he’d never tell them that it was just his drinking buddy, that would kill the mystique.

Everyone knew CPD was corrupt, of course, but having someone confirming it for Murray was hugely validating.

“Lieutenant Hoffstader got busted in a whore house again two nights ago. They don’t intend to reprimand him,” Jim said between puffs of a cigarette while Murray took notes.

“You are the least loyal cop I’ve ever met,” he said.

“Well most of the cops _you_ meet are trying to beat the shit out of you,” he said, pushing some hair out of his face.

“The kinda thing you only dream of doing.”

Jim snorted. “If I wanted to, I would have so many opportunities.”

“Like when I’m sleeping.”

“Or any time at all.”

The bickering continued like that for some time, for some days, for some months. Really, it was mostly all they did.

_(“You’re making it sound like flirting,” Joyce said, clearly still a little stung by Murray’s own assessment of her and Jim’s relationship._

_“I mean. Did I say it wasn’t?”)_

Where it all went wrong, was a particularly unfortunate night of booze. A brief and unsuccessful encounter with a couple of girls had left them stumbling home alone, of course. They usually did.

“We’re gonna die alone,” a particularly morose Murray said, with a cynical chuckle.

Jim snorted, lighting another cigarette, even though Murray was convinced they put toxic chemicals in them beyond what was on the warning label, he had yet to get Jim to quit.

“I mean I guess we got each other,” Jim said, as if that were a great tragedy, and not something that made Murray feel even more awkwardly self-conscious than he usually did.

_(“Wait did you really have a crush on Hopper?”_

_“Dammit, woman. Let me tell the story.”)_

“Well, if I gotta disappoint someone in the sack, it may as well be a friend,” Murray says. “And you…” He gestures vaguely, the criticism unspoken but clear to everyone in the room except Jim.

They were alone.

“Me? What’s wrong with me?”

“I mean. A little…rough around the edges,” he said, shrugging.

“I’m a little rough around the edges? You believe in aliens.”

“I mean, it’s arrogant to presume we’re the only life in this entire infinite universe!” he defended himself. “Come on!”

“Yeah but that doesn’t mean they’re in Chicago causing havoc!”

“Do you have any proof they’re not?”

“That’s not how proof works,” Jim said, rubbing his hand down his face in frustrated agony. “You’re a journalist, you know that’s not how it works!”

“You don’t even know how your shower works!”

He sputtered. “That was one time!”

Like any good argument, they were presently in each other’s face, yelling incoherent insults about a random smattering of things, both a little red-faced and a lot drunk.

\--

**_1985, Hawkins._ **

“And that’s where we end tonight’s dinner theater,” Murray slurred, a little too caught up in his nostalgia, but not so caught up that he didn’t know where to hit the breaks.

“Aw, come on! You’re getting to the good part,” Joyce said. “Did you punch him?”

“Uh.”

“Oh my god you kissed him.”

“Hey! Why couldn’t he have kissed me?”

“Murray. Murray. It was you.”

Hiding his face in his hands, he choked out a laugh. “Astute.”

“Are you for real?”

“I mean, I’m really drunk, this could’ve all been a dream as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s how you two fell out? You kissed him and it got weird?” Joyce pressed, sincerely interested, so much so that she didn’t seem to notice the rapidly melting ice ruining her drink at the moment.

“Oh no we fully…”

“God am I the only person who didn’t have sex with Jim Hopper?” she groaned.

“Too bad for you. I mean, it was terrible, but we were 22. I’m sure he got better.”

\--

**_1965, Chicago._ **

“Let’s agree to never speak of this again.”

“Agreed.”


	3. 1968/1985/the 1970s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS A WEIRD ENDING
> 
> but.  
> i love it.   
> whatever.   
> consider it in the same timeline as my other most recent stranger things fics. i wanted to finish it before i got into an idea i had for a robin/kali fic!

**_1985, Hawkins._ **

“So where did it all go wrong?” Joyce asked, leaning forward on her hands.

“With me? I think it started the day I was born…” he said, already fairly drunk for that night’s story time. The kitchen table was an island in a sea of chaos, the vodka bottle between them a little lighthouse. Metaphor was not coming easily to him in that moment.

She scoffed. “We do not have the time or alcohol for that.”

“Oh, right, Jim.” He sighed. “Well, there’s less story to it. I mean, the one night did kind of extinguish any semblance of attraction between us because we were…terrible. Just, god awful. But the whole relationship…you probably know the rest, at this point.”

“The war, then?”

“Yeah. Jim left to go to Vietnam.” He wrinkled his nose. “Around the time I got married and popped out a kid. Slightly rushed, I admit, but my mother didn’t want me to have one out of wedlock and interracial marriage had just be legalized federally –”

She cut in. “You were married? You have a _child_?”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

“Because you live like a monster, Murray,” she said, gesturing around as if they weren’t in her house. “And you’ve never mentioned them!”

“I didn’t always. Plus we’re…estranged.”

Joyce seemed to realize they were getting off track. “But then how did Hopper know where to find you twenty years later?”

“We just… we stayed in touch, a little, you know.”

\--

**_1968, Chicago._ **

Jim wasn’t as gentle with the cuffs as he had been in previous arrests.

“Really? Police brutality?”

“You’re participating in a riot. Don’t you have better things to do?”

“Better than my Constitutional right to protest the unjust fascist state we now live in?” Murray shot back, shoved out of the crowd.

“Don’t you have a kid now, Murray?” he asked, exasperated.

“She’s with my mother.”

“…Where’s Rachel? In there?” Jim said, pointing to the crowd, narrowing his eyes.

Murray didn’t deign to answer such an obvious question, shrugging and gesturing for Jim to let him steal a puff off his cigarette.

“I’m gonna let you go since you’re cooperating.” He paused. “I’m leaving soon, you know.”

“They’re sending you over there?” he asked, pained. “This is exactly what we’re protesting. Get with it, man!”

“I don’t have a choice, Murray.”

“I guess I’ll see you when you get back?”

Jim unlocked the cuffs and shoved him away from the crowds and police wagons. The riot was reaching a fevered pitch behind them. MC-5 was still playing in the distance, but the Democratic Convention was thoroughly derailed.

(Good, fuck Nixon.)

“Maybe. Hopefully not.”

\--

**_1972, Chicago._ **

Murray got a phone call at his desk, which wasn’t uncommon those days, but he still kind of hated it. “Murray Bauman,” he answered robotically.

The 70s were a prosperous and gentle time in Murray’s life. He was finally a proper journalist, Rachel was home from her many sojourns with Green Peace, his mother didn’t have anything to badger him about because he’d hit every arbitrary accomplishment she and her friends from temple had set for their children, and at 5, Naomi was hitting the age where she stopped being hopeless and started having her own opinions about the world. However, dissatisfaction creeped in. It always did. Murray was rarely comfortable or settled.

And he fucking hated phone calls.

“Been a long time,” a familiar but long-distant voice said.

“Jim Hopper?”

He had been distantly aware that Hopper had survived Vietnam and returned to the States, and vaguely aware that he’d landed in New York. They had parted on their typically shaky terms, so he was more than a little shocked to hear from him after four years of silence.

“You’re still with the Sun Times,” he said.

“You keeping tabs on me?”

“I keep tabs on everyone useful I meet,” he said, stern and not at all the childish, impudent rookie cop he had been four years ago. This was almost sinister.

“Okay…then what do you need?”

“I have some information about a corrupt chief over here in New York, and I think I’m less likely to arouse suspicion if it leaks in Chicago first.”

Murray grabbed his note pad. “Let me call you back on the pay phone outside,” he said. Perhaps it was overly careful, but he found a little bit of comfort in only taking information on a line that couldn’t necessarily be traced back to him, especially since he’d spray painted over the lens of the security camera outside of the Sun Times’ office.

They’d figure that one out eventually, but for now…

He got the information between drags on a cigarette, by the sound of it. “How’s Rachel and the kid?”

“Good. How about you?”

“Got married two years ago, now. Had a baby girl last year. Sara.”

“Good name.”

“Yeah. Well. If you’re in New York, I’m sure you’ll know how to find me.”

\--

**_1975, New York City._ **

He had a bagel and a coffee and an inkling of where he could find Jim at ten AM on a Wednesday, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“Oh, long time no see,” Jim said mildly, as if they were friends and not weirdly trapped in each other’s orbit of strangeness, passing news and information between their two cities.

“Coffee. Can we talk?”

“I always have time for my favorite journalist.”

Jim made friends with journalists in whatever city he worked in, Murray found. It was a smart move for a detective, to work with the press rather than act, as his jug-headed peers might, as though he was above the power of public opinion. Having avenues of information made him a fairer, more well-thought of cop. It was a smart move, politically, too.

If a little paranoid.

But maybe that’s why they got on so well.

\--

**_1977, Chicago._ **

They kept in contact, but seeing Jim in Chicago was a shock. And by the looks of him, hollow and pale, it wasn’t a work visit.

“Jim?”

“Jesus fuck, do you sneak up on everyone like that?” he asked, hands shaking as he struggled to light a cigarette.

“You’re not here to see me, right?”

“No. I’m seeing an oncologist.”

“Jim, what the – are you –”

“Not for me.” He closed his eyes and took a long, shaky breath. “Sara has… uh. Lung cancer, they think. I heard good things about this guy, so I flew out to see if bringing her here might be –” He was stuttering through it. “Why am I telling you this? Forget I…”

“Yeah, I can forget it, if you want. I don’t wanna…”

Don’t wanna impose? Don’t wanna be privy to people’s most vulnerable moments?

“I’m gonna go get a sandwich from down the block. If you’re gonna be here, I can bring you one too.”

“Sure.”

\--

**_1983, Hawkins._ **

“I’m not going to answer anymore calls from you about this, Murray.”

The Holland case was not going well. Rachel had left to stay with her sister, and wasn’t answering phone calls.

\--

**_1984, Hawkins._ **

The portrayal of Jim Hopper as an incompetent police chief didn’t make sense. That wasn’t who he was, he was careful and fastidious. Unless Sara’s death and his divorce had fundamentally changed him as a person.

“Look, there’s more to this than you’re saying,” Murray stressed.

His theories had been ping-ponging from wild to plausible and while he never anticipated the scope of what had happened, truly, but… he was desperate. He was talking, one man who had lost so much to another, and Jim was brushing him off, like they were kids again.

They hadn’t really known each other that well.

\--

**_1984, Hawkins._ **

“I had to lie,” Jim said.

“I know. So did we,” Murray said, shrugging.

“Maybe now we can go back to how it was before.”

“Sure. Here’s my number. If anything comes up…”

“Yeah.”

\--

**_May, 1985._ **

“Philadelphia just dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood,” Murray said into the payphone at the 7-11, shuffling his newspaper on his daily snack run.

“Jesus Christ. What the fuck is happening here?”

“Shot the survivors as they fled the flames.”

He could hear Jim’s blood pressure rising.

“World’s fucked.”

\--

**_July 1985, Hawkins_ **

“And that basically brings us to the present,” Murray slurred, slouching back onto Joyce’s headboard. He had no idea when in the ensuing monologue they had moved to Joyce’s room. They were collapsed on top of the comforter, passing a bottle of gin between the two of them.

“Fuck, man,” Joyce said.

“I know.”

She was resting on Murray’s shoulder. “I miss him.”

“Me too,” he said, his eyes starting to close.

Silence filled Joyce’s room as they rushed towards sleep.

“I think Jim’s still alive,” Murray said, a half-coherent thought that he couldn’t stop before it escaped.

Joyce’s snore was interrupted and jagged. “Fuck off, Murray.”


End file.
